The Darwin Machine: Artificial Life and Interactive Art

Alifers are peripherally associated with the related, perhaps less deterministic fields of non-linear dynamics and complexity theory by virtue of their common interest in self-organising systems and emergent order.
 Includes: 1. computational Biologists  2. builders of procedural systems  3. Subsumption and 'bottom up' roboticists utilize ethological analogies create bottom up emergent behavior in mobile machines. 4. Builders of autonomous digital agents to do work in the digital realm. 5. Wet Alifers

define the meaning of these terms

Sensitive Dependance.  

Fractality.
Entropy and Self-Organisation.
Emergence and Reductivism.  

The Top-Down paradigm, exactly replicates the dualistic structures outlined above, like the hardware/software pair, the Top Down method centralises `intelligence' in a central processor, into which data is fed from (unintelligent) sensors, and which in turn instructs actuators, having meantime prepared a master plan. The problem with this method is that it is computationally intensive and causes processing bottlenecks in with real world problems without formally bounded domains. 

An interactive work, like any work, consciously or unconsciously embodies a value system.
The discussion of mimesis is complexified by the intrusion of this goal of a parallel order 

A question of mimesis and modernism: Is the artist concerned with simulating or interactively representing an existing being, or with inventing another possible being. 

Artificial Life, is the instrumentalization of a very particular notion of `evolution'.